< -------------- Sir Moonie ?! .... !!!!! :
https://www.wsj.com/articles/selfie-politics-1510185694" Selfie Politics "
" Trump, in fact, tweets as the Everyman of America’s new politics: Embrace Me! "
By Daniel Henninger
" Ed Gillespie is the canary in the mine shaft for Republican politics. We’ll push that further: Virginia is the canary in the mine shaft for all of American politics.
Years ago, coal miners who worked down amid the dangers of carbon monoxide would keep a caged canary nearby. If the canary looked dead, the miners got out.The big difference for our comparison is that while miners are smart enough to recognize toxic gas, our two political parties are not. The American people are the canaries.
For Democrats, political identity is by now well-established as a function of one’s race, gender or sexual self-definition. Refined further, a Democrat is a “person of color” or a “woman” or a “transgender” person. Those who don’t qualify for a category keep mum. From these identities flow many streams of potential violations, slights and transgressions justifying political action against “them.”
Democrats found validation for the politics of identity in the Virginia results. Some 77% of unmarried women voted for Ralph Northam. Ed Gillespie was standing in front of an anti-Trump train.
Voters in college towns, where the politics of identity was born, also voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Northam.
The Democrats’ not unreasonable takeaway from Virginia will be that identity politics works, so do more of it.
The Republicans’ political identity, if the media consensus is to be believed, is almost wholly a function of some inchoate white anger also directed at “them.”
Donald Trump won the presidency because he mined white anger at the margins against a different “them” of immigrants and globalization, meaning the whole wide world is arrayed against whatever it means to be a “white male” in 21st-century America.The Republicans’ logical takeaway from Virginia should be that in competitive election venues—such as the suburban counties and congressional districts of Florida, Ohio, North Carolina or Wisconsin—their political anger has bigger numbers than your anger. Intensity is interesting but irrelevant. In politics, smaller numbers still mean you lose.
We are in the era of selfie politics. In Donald Trump, we have a selfie president. After the Virginia gubernatorial loss, the first nine words of Mr. Trump’s tweet from Asia were: “Ed Gillespie worked hard but did not embrace me . . .”
For all the antipathy directed at Mr. Trump, he in fact speaks as the Everyman of America’s selfie politics: Embrace Me! Self-interest, the old normal in politics, has been subsumed by a new normal of insistent self-regard.
Running in the background of selfieism, like a cellphone’s unseen operating system, there is in fact a U.S. presidency and a politics inhabited by serious people who are conducting foreign policy, such as North Korea’s ICBMs, or domestic policy, such as a rewrite of the tax code. But who has time for that?
The only thing the Democrats’ self-categorizers can see staring back at them from their screens is whatever awful thing Donald Trump has tweeted about . . . Me!Mr. Trump, meanwhile, believes that his tweets animate his base, or as he wrote recently when a Twitter factotum shut down his account for 11 minutes, “the word must finally be getting out—and having an impact.”
But in Virginia, the butterfly effect of Mr. Trump’s tiny tweets appears to be that it produced historically high turnout for the opposing candidate. We’ll never know whether Mr. Trump is right that Ed Gillespie would have won had he fully embraced “me,” or instead would have lost by another 9 points.
It is true that in 2016 Mr. Trump tapped into a winning vein of identity politics, but one may wonder if that strategy is already losing its utility. Even aggrieved white males don’t much care for being someone’s identity group. You don’t hear much about this swath of Trumpian voters anymore. Media anthropologists have stopped visiting their tribal villages in Pennsylvania and Michigan.
But a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll this week of “Trump counties,” where collectively Mr. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton 57% to 37%, found his disapproval rating touching 50% this month. That is another sick canary.
Meanwhile, the anti-Trump and Never-Trump factions remain in a state of 24/7 paroxysm. Democrats may conclude that the path back to power is with a coalition of people in a lather over Mr. Trump, and they may be right. The selfie president’s angry tweets could create a tsunami of even angrier selfie voters, like those in Virginia, that will wash over GOP candidates.
The Democrats can self-destruct. The identity politics in which they’ve become mired is neurotically combustible, with the categories constantly denouncing nominal friends for arcane offenses such as “cultural appropriation.” Late in the Virginia campaign, when Mr. Northam waffled on embracing sanctuary cities, a major progressive group branded him a “racist.” The party’s identity police never sleep.
The Republicans have a Twitter problem, but the Democrats have a crazy-left problem. Voters will get more chances to take their pick in this race to the bottom. "